Long COVID in cancer patients: preponderance of symptoms in majority of patients over long time period.
- The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, United States
Abstract
Background: An increasing number of observational studies have reported the persistence of symptoms following recovery from acute COVID-19 disease in non-cancer patients. The long-term consequences of COVID-19 are not fully understood particularly in the cancer patient population. The purpose of this study is to assess post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC) in cancer patients following acute COVID-19 recovery.
Methods: We identified cancer patients at MD Anderson Cancer Center who were diagnosed with COVID-19 disease between March 1, 2020 and Sept 1, 2020 and followed them till May 2021. To assess PASC, we collected patients reported outcomes through questionnaires that were sent to patients daily for 14 days after COVID-19 diagnosis then weekly for 3 months, and then monthly thereafter. We also reviewed patients' electronic medical records to capture the persistence or emergence of new COVID19-related symptoms reported during any clinic or hospital encounter beyond 30 days of the acute illness and up to 14 months.
Results: We included 312 cancer patients with a median age of 57 years (18-86). The majority of patients had solid tumors (75%). Of the 312 patients, 188 (60%) reported long COVID-19 symptoms with a median duration of 7 months and up to 14 months after COVID-19 diagnosis. The most common symptoms reported included fatigue (82%), sleep disturbances (78%), myalgias (67%) and gastrointestinal symptoms (61%), followed by headache, altered smell or taste, dyspnea (47%) and cough (46%). A higher number of females reported a persistence of symptoms compared to males (63% vs 37%; p=0.036). Cancer type, neutropenia, lymphocytopenia, and hospital admission during acute COVID-19 disease were comparable in both groups. Among the 188 patients with PASC, only 16 (8.5%) were readmitted for COVID-related reasons.
Conclusions: More than one out of two cancer patients, and more likely females, report PASC that may persist beyond 6 months and even one year. The most common symptoms are non-respiratory and consist of fatigue, sleep disturbance, myalgia and gastro-intestinal symptoms. Most of the cancer patients with PASC were managed on outpatient basis with only 8,5% requiring a COVID-19 related re-admission.
Funding: This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute under award number P30CA016672, which supports the MD Anderson Cancer Center Clinical Trials Office. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Data availability
Data Availability Statement: The study protocol, statistical analysis plan, lists of deidentified individual data, generated tables and figures will be made available upon request by qualified scientific and medical researchers for legitimate research purposes. Requests should be sent to achaftari@mdanderson.org and yijiang@mdanderson.org. Data will be available on request for 6 months from the date of publication. Investigators are invited to submit study proposal requests detailing research questions and hypotheses in order to receive access to these data.
Article and author information
Author details
Anne-Marie Chaftari
Cielito Reyes-Gibby
Funding
National Institutes of Health (P30CA016672)
- Hiba Dagher
- Anne-Marie Chaftari
- Ishwaria M Subbiah
- Alexandre E Malek
- Ying Jiang
- Peter Lamie
- Bruno Granwehr
- Teny John
- Eduardo Yepez
- Jovan Borjan
- Cielito Reyes-Gibby
- Mary Flores
- Fareed Khawaja
- Mala Pande
- Noman Ali
- Raniv Rojo
- Daniel D Karp
- Ray Hachem
- Issam I Raad
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: This study was approved by the institutional review board at MD Anderson. A waiver of informed consent was obtained since this study posed no risk to the patients given that no clinical or laboratory interventions were done.
Copyright
© 2023, Dagher et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Long COVID in cancer patients: preponderance of symptoms in majority of patients over long time period.
eLife 12:e81182.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.81182
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